Environmental History -- Seventh Class: Transforming Landscapes

This week in my Environmental History course (ERST-CAST-HIST 4670H), we traced the transformation of our regional landscape.  (Last week the course had visits from Trent's Maps, Data and Government Documents librarian and the Trent Archivist, so no blog post.)

From the students' point of view, a major part of the work of the course is the development of a plan for studying the environmental history of our region: connecting practical research strategies with larger ideas about how human activities and our environment have changed over time.  So this week's class aimed to build a foundation for that project: surveying how these activities and changes have been experienced within the region of Ontario centered on Peterborough, and also, how this history can be interpreted in the context of larger trends, such as agricultural and industrial transformation, population growth (and decline), the emergence of a leisure economy, conservation initiatives, and evolving patterns and networks of movement.

All these trends have left traces within our region.  I began by reviewing the local history of agricultural activity (understood in terms of the interaction between market forces and local environmental conditions).  Then, I turned to the regional history of the timber trade: the exploitation (and eventual near-extinction) of white pine.  From there, it was on to the creation of a local tourist economy, as the lakes north of Peterborough were transformed from industrial to recreational resources -- a change accompanied by changing ideas about nature.

At this point, I took a few minutes to talk about movement -- always a key theme in environmental history -- and how regional waterways, roads, and railways shaped how people experienced the landscape.

Then, we moved on to situating this regional history within a national context: of resource development, and also of emerging concerns regarding the impacts of exploitation -- as seen in the case of Atlantic salmon in Ontario, sawdust in rivers, and forest conservation.  I situated the conservation movement, and the Canadian Commission of Conservation (1909-1921), within these issues and evolving relations between interest groups.  We also studied (and discussed in small groups) some primary sources relating to conservation history.

The class wrapped up by considering two additional themes: the place of rivers and energy in this history (Peterborough was once known as "the electric city," after all), and the relation between local history and ecological restoration: how different ways of conserving and restoring express different ideas about the history of the landscape.